Top White House officials said Wednesday that reductions in force are coming soon across the government. They’ve already started at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Hours after government funding lapsed, the Patent and Trademark Office began firing personnel, according to an internal email and interviews with staff. The fired personnel are people in business support units, such as communications, according to the staffers NOTUS spoke with.
About 140 of the USPTO’s 14,000 employees received notice of their firing, Bloomberg Law reported.
The Office of Personnel Management declined to comment and directed questions to the Patent and Trademark Office, which did not respond to requests for comment.
President Donald Trump and administration officials threatened to lay off federal workers if Democrats did not vote with Republicans to fund the government. It’s not clear that the Patent and Trademark Office firings are related to that threat. But officials said layoffs were coming soon.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told Republican lawmakers Wednesday that RIFs would be “consequential” and would begin in a day or two, according to multiple sources on the call.
Vice President JD Vance told reporters at a White House briefing that layoffs would happen over the coming weeks. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked repeatedly about a timeline said, “Two days. Imminent. Very soon… All of those things are very synonymous with one another.”
Leavitt said Democrats would ultimately be responsible for the expected firing of federal workers.
“Well, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do … If the Democrats did not vote to shut down the government, we would not be standing up here talking about layoffs today,” Leavitt said. She did not answer, when asked by NOTUS, whether a shorter shutdown would reverse the reduction in forces.
Government shutdowns in the past have involved furloughs but not permanent layoffs; lapses in government funding do not require reductions in force.
The president and the administration have sent mixed messages on whether they view this shutdown as an opportunity to further shrink the federal government.
“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” the president said in the Oval Office Tuesday, after earlier saying that benefits and Democratic-favored programs could also be at risk should the government shut down.
In meetings Wednesday, some staff at the Department of Agriculture were informed that the government shutdown had triggered the OPM’s instructions that agencies should start preparing RIF notices, a source told NOTUS.
The Patent and Trademark Office is one of the rare federal agencies that has not ceased any operations during the shutdown. The agency is funded through fees and has a budget surplus with reserves it can rely on to keep the agency functioning.
One of the laid-off Patent and Trademark Office workers, a longtime federal employee, called the firings “unnecessary and cruel” and told NOTUS they were devastated and shocked by the move.